The grapes were withered on the vine. A feathery white fungus covered the withered globes and crept over the curling leaves. In the autumn moonlight, it glowed like fresh snow.
The wine that had come from the fruit in years past had been dark amber, and sweeter than wildflower honey. The rot then had been desirable. Noble.
Now it was just a sign of decay.
She sniffed her fingers. Perfume still lingered in the greasy mold, sweetness in decay.
Thud.
She looked up from the vines, wiping her hands on her skirt. Eyes narrowed, she stalked through the rows across the field, slipping through the gate and standing beneath a huge weeping willow that dominated the yard. Its drooping branches hung around her like the brittle bars of a cell.
He lifted the shovel and brought it down again: thud. Like a bludgeon against cold flesh. Thud.
Katerin plucked a thin branch from the willow and began to knot it into a circlet. Silence.
She looked up and saw him watching her.
“Scavenging again?” she asked, stepping into the moonlight. The grass was cold beneath her bare feet. Her ankles were streaked with dark green stains.
He nodded, lifting a fabric-wrapped bundle. She forestalled him with a hand on his arm and pulled the old sheet aside. A slim, fair boy with pale flesh. Grey-white, like the decaying grapes. The softest parts were missing.
“You shouldn’t eat them after they’re dead,” she rebuked him, turning away and placing the circlet in her hair. “It’s not healthy.”
The man gently placed the body into the shallow grave and kicked dirt over it.
“Everyone left is dying or dead,” he said mildly. “Everyone but us.”
“The grapes, too.” She turned to face him. “They’ve been dying for years, and now they’re dead for good.”
“Not yet,” Vasil said firmly. “The land will give us this last harvest.”
“The land,” she sighed, turning. Behind her, he began shovelling dirt back into the hole.
The next day she leaned against the low bridge wall and gazed at the pack that roared down the dirt road on motorbikes. They wore leathers and furs like latter-day Mongols. The cold morning breeze stirred her hair, rippled the thin cotton blouse she’d tucked into a brightly dyed East Indian skirt. One of the men, riding pillion, looked up and met her eyes as they passed below the bridge, and she felt that moment of connection that sometimes happens between strangers.
He found her later that afternoon. She was uncorking a bottle and draining its contents on the asphalt outside the stores. As she placed the bottle in the basket, he materialized, watching from the shadows across the street.
She walked back inside the abandoned shop and pulled two more bottles from the shelves, carrying them to the porch. She used a corkscrew to open the bottles. He was watching. He didn’t strike her as much of a threat. She drained the bottles. He edged forward like a nervous cur.
When she brought out the next two bottles, he held out his hands. They were narrow, long-fingered, and dirty. She handed him the bottles. He uncorked them for her, working the corkscrew with less effort. With a shy glance, he upended them, dumping the sour yellow wine into the street.
“Thanks,” she said, taking them.
He was tall, thin, with pale skin and long, deep copper hair. His face was daubed with dirt and oil, and lines around his mouth, his eyes, suggested age. His city-scavenged clothes were those of a fallen aristocracy; soiled silks and threadbare velvets. An iron circlet had been welded around his neck. He shivered in the cold weather, looking disbelievingly at her bare feet, her thin clothing.
“Are you all alone here?” he asked, voice soft and cultured. “Do you want to join us? We have warmer clothes…”
She smiled as she crouched over the basket, tucking an old flowered tablecloth between the bottles to keep them from rattling against each other. Then she rose and touched his metal collar with her fingertips. The iron was warm from his body heat and trembled slightly with his pulse.
“Not like that,” she said.
He looked away, hair falling into his eyes.
“They wouldn’t. Not to a woman. You could be a chieftain’s queen.”
She slid her fingers from the collar to his chin, lifting his face, though he was taller than she. His eyes met hers, green and filled with fear.
“And is your chieftain cruel?”
He looked away, and she withdrew her hand.
“Is yours?” he asked.
She laughed and left him standing alone in the empty street. Just as she was about to turn the corner, something made her turn around. He still stood there, looking frail and helpless. Something –- compassion? –- made her speak.
“Be careful tonight,” she called, the volume of her own voice startling her in the silent afternoon. “Don’t sleep, and don’t stray too far from the others.”
He started forward, but she turned and continued around the corner. He didn’t run after her.
Vasil woke her with his digging. She uncurled from the aluminum chair in the old kitchen and stepped outside. Another sheet-wrapped form was being interred beneath the frost-covered ground. Dawn. She’d slept through the night, and the embers in the fireplace behind her were cool. She shifted, pulling a shawl around her shoulders and shivering.
“The gas burner is broken,” she said as he returned. “I couldn’t melt the lead.”
“I’ll search for another one today.” His face had lost its ivory sheen. He looked healthier than he had, before. He set the shovel against the crumbling brick wall. “Thank you for the bottles.”
“Why do we stay here? It must be better, elsewhere.”
“It’s just for a few more years.” He said it like a promise to himself. “Long enough to bottle this year’s harvest. Then — then, we’ll see.”
She sighed. The same answer. Again. She gazed past him at the new grave.
“Will there be any trouble?”
“Not if they respect the old ways. Otherwise….” he shrugged. “You’d better stay inside today.”
“Oh? Since when are you afraid for me?”
“Of course I fear for you. You’re my family.”
“I wish I weren’t, if it would free me from this place.” She looked down and shook her skirt slightly. Leaves and road dust fell from it to the broken tiles under her dirty feet. She looked sideways at him again. He waited. He always waited. He was as patient as a stone. Sometimes his patience made her want to scream.
“All right,” she said at last, reluctantly walking back to the wooden kitchen door. She stopped before stepping inside. “I’ll stay inside. But just for today.”
“If they come at all, they will come today.”
They came in the late afternoon, motorbikes roaring down the narrow dirt path leading to the dacha. Katerin sat on the window seat and looked through the casements, her fingers resting gently on the glass.
They drove their vehicles in circles before the front door. From the second floor, she watched the bikes pass and separate and pass again in their dance of growling uncertainty.
Although she looked, she didn’t see the gleam of copper hair.
Finally one of the bikes stopped, and the rest pulled up in a line. Its rider swung off the sheepskin-covered seat and walked to the front door, out of her sight. Thunder echoed through the stone halls, iron on iron.
Katerin hurried out of the room and down the winding stairs, one hand on the bannister, but Vasil reached the door first. She stopped, waiting at the foot of the stair in the shadowed foyer.
The barbarian was taller than Vasil, although Vasil was not short, and his bulk diminished Vasil’s slim grace. Healthy — strangers were always healthy. Strangers, and Vasil, and she. But it was the barbarian who stepped back, steel buckles and studs flashing in the fading sunlight.
“Yes, my friend?” Vasil asked.
“We saw that someone still lives here,” the barbarian said, scowling. His accent reminded Katerin of port towns and the Black Sea.
“Very few.” Vasil gestured negligently. “Almost everyone has died or moved away.”
“Two of my men vanished last night. Did they come here?”
“One of them is here. He was the tithe for camping in my lands.”
The barbarian bared his teeth and took the step forward again. He and Vasil stood close, nearly chest-to-chest. Behind him the others stirred, jackets falling open, hands reaching back to their leather saddlebags. Katerin moved closer as well, pressing her cheek against the wall, standing close enough to Vasil to hear him breathe. Neither of the men looked at her.
“Which did you take? The slave or the freeman?”
“I saw no mark of slavery on him.”
“Stanko, then.” The barbarian reached into his leather jacket with a half-gloved hand. Blued steel gleamed dully as he pointed the automatic at Vasil. “Too bad, boyär. You should have taken the slave.”
“Are your bullets silver?”
The barbarian’s eyes narrowed. Katerin didn’t move as Vasil left the doorway, stepped onto the rickety front porch. Now their chests did touch. The barbarian held the stance a moment, then stepped back again, uncomfortable. Two failures of nerve. Katerin glanced away, suddenly bored. He didn’t have a chance.
“If they are not,” Vasil continued, “you will not have a chance to pull the trigger twice.”
One of the other barbarians joined his leader, tilting his head as he spoke swiftly in another language, a Western language.
Somebody hissed in the dark room behind her. Katerin turned.
He crouched beside the davenport, arms resting on his knees, the tails of his waistcoat dragging on the ground. His face and hands glowed in the shadows, as pale as grape-mold.
She walked to him. He stood when she drew near. Green eyes rose to glance over her shoulder, still fearful.
“You ran away.”
“I listened to your advice and didn’t sleep.” He looked back at her, swallowing. The metal collar rose and fell around his throat. “I saw Him attack Stanko and drag him away.”
“And you decided to follow? Are you insane?”
“I had to,” he breathed softly, torn between horror and wonder. His eyes focused inward, on old memories, childhood memories. “I owned books, once. I remember stories….”
Somebody shot. The slave flinched, hands shielding his face. Katerin spun around to see Vasil take the gun from the barbarian leader, easily pulling it from his hands. Behind them the others hesitated between firing their own weapons or fleeing to their chrome-and-steel mounts.
Vasil tossed the gun aside and reached for the chieftain’s collar. The chieftain’s advisor stepped back and crossed himself.
The chieftain pulled a long knife from his belt and drove it into Vasil’s stomach. The slave grabbed Katerin’s hand, and she squeezed it as she might a child’s, absently reassuring.
“Steel,” Vasil said, his free hand falling on the hilt of the barbarian’s weapon and pulling it out. The leather warrior tried to speak, couldn’t. Vasil let the knife clatter to the porch. No blood stained his torn shirt. Katerin had seen the trick before. Someday someone would have a silver weapon, and then Vasil would be surprised. It would be an interesting change, she mused.
“My family has ruled these lands from the age of iron to the age of ash. This is my estate. Do you understand?”
The barbarian nodded, face white.
“Forgive me, böyar,” he rasped, eyes wide. “I — we — we did not realize. We will leave you in peace.”
Vasil released him.
“If you stay, I will return tonight.” He turned, entering the house and closing the door behind him.
Katerin blinked in the sudden darkness. She heard rather than saw Vasil join them in the dusty parlor.
“You must be the slave. I was nearly blamed for your death, too,” Vasil murmured, seeing the newcomer. As her eyes adjusted, Katerin saw the slave drop to his knees, hands clasped before him. He looked like he was praying. She didn’t think that Vasil looked like much of a saint in his dirty work clothes.
“Please, my lord,” the slave said faintly. “I escaped them last night. I followed you here.” He summoned his courage and looked up. “I can read and write. I can help you with the harvest. Will you grant me sanctuary?”
Vasil walked forward and stood over him, dropping his hand to touch the metal collar around the stranger’s neck. Katerin surprised herself by hoping Vasil would keep him. There were books in the library she didn’t understand. Perhaps the stranger would.
“So,” Vasil said after a long moment, “perhaps it is time for my household to grow. What is your name?”
“Reynard.”
“Not a good name for family.” Vasil shook his head and walked away, disappointed. Reynard looked at Katerin, who shrugged. She would wait and see, too.
“The generators were destroyed in the riots,” she said, setting the basket down on a broken concrete pillar. “Then the scraps were scavenged.”
Reynard shivered slightly in the bridge’s shadow. They stood on the river bank. The sun was low, and the wind had begun to rise.
“They’re rebuilding, to the West,” he said softly.
“We don’t need electricity,” she said. “Look, here are their graves.”
Reynard’s eyes followed her finger. A wooden plank had been set to mark the spot, but weather had faded the letters.
“Did Vasil eat them, too?”
“Of course not,” she said reproachfully. “My mother died when I was born, and my father shot himself, after.”
“Oh.” Reynard looked down, shoving his hands into the ripped pockets of his waistcoat. “Were they friends, Vasil and your parents?”
“My parents were part of Vasil’s household,” she said, suddenly losing interest and picking up the basket again. “I don’t know much about them. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Did you know your mother and father?”
Reynard was silent for a few minutes. She glanced at him. He shrugged awkwardly.
“They were killed.”
“By that gang?”
“No.” He scrambled up the river bank after her, getting grass stains on hands. “By rioters.”
“You were alive during the rioting?” She stopped and peered into his face. He was older than she, but she hadn’t thought he was that old. He looked away, embarrassed.
“I was just a child.”
“But you remember how it was, before?”
“No, no….” He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “The rioting went on for years. Nobody remembers anymore.”
“Vasil does. When did you get this, then?” She touched the collar, drawing his eyes back to her. He shrugged.
“I was living alone, and they found me and took me.”
“But they kept you instead of selling you.”
“They decided I was useful.” For the first time, she heard bitterness in his voice. She stepped away and started walking again, down the broken pavement of the highway.
“Were you very old when they caught you?”
He followed her, pulling up the stained collar of the ragged coat.
“About your age, I suppose. Old enough. I called myself a historian.” The dust was cool under his feet, the chill breeze of the evening building. “I was going from town to town, trying to reconstruct the last fifty years from books and newspapers.”
“Why did they want a historian?” she asked, letting him catch up.
“They didn’t. But I could do other things for them, things I learned from books.” He looked away from her. “I was their mechanic. Their doctor. Whatever they needed.”
“Very useful. Why did they beat you?”
He glanced at her, emerald eyes darkening in the fading light.
“What makes you think they did that?”
“I can smell it on you.” She reached out and touched his hand, felt it tremble under her fingertips. He wouldn’t pull his hand away and thus admit weakness. Finally she tired of teasing him and let her fingers slide from his hand to adjust the basket.
“Is Vasil a kind master?” he asked, as they turned down the track toward the mansion. She remembered that he’d asked before. He seemed very worried about it.
“Vasil doesn’t know anything about kindness or cruelty,” she said simply, twitching her skirt over a puddle in the road. “All he cares about is his land.”
Reynard leaned over the table. Sunlight slanted through the winery window, burned on his hair, glowed on his cheek. Long, ragged-nailed fingers turned the gas tank.
“It should work,” he said, setting it down and looking up at Katerin. “All I needed to do was clean out the rust. Should I take it into the house?”
“No. I need it here, to melt the lead for sealing the bottles.” She looked up at the roof of the great stone building, then down to the the great vats and barrels. “Vasil is determined to bottle every vintage until the last, even though we hardly drink what we have. Who will be left to drink it after we’re gone?”
“Should I go tell him the burner is fixed?”
“No. He doesn’t care. This is my job.” Katerin shook her head. “Thank you, Reynard. You might as well go now.”
He bit his lip, fearful that he had given offense, and left, ill-fitting boots shuffling on the old, smooth stone of the floor.
After he was gone, she reached into the pockets of her skirt to pull out rings and chains, a fortune in silver jewelry scrounged from town.
“‘… For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expan–’”
“Is the whole book like that?” she interrupted, leaning her chin against her knees. He stopped.
“Most of it. It’s philosophy. Or theology.”
“It doesn’t make any sense when you read it, either.” She played with the hem of her skirt with one hand, dusty toes bare over the edge of the chair seat. “Do you know what it’s supposed to mean?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
Reynard looked out the window. The sun was setting. He could see Vasil’s dark form crossing the yard, a shovel over one shoulder.
“It means that some things are so special they make the rest of the world seem empty in comparison.”
“So?”
“So things like that, the special things, are dangerous.”
She smiled, looking wise.
“They’re not so dangerous as all that.”
Vasil stood in the doorway to face the visitors. There were six. Katerin sat on the steps, brushing her hair, and Reynard stood behind her, hands gripping the wooden bannister, the frayed hem of his long coat lightly touching her shoulders as she moved.
“Tithe,” one of the visitors repeated emotionlessly, hand clenching and unclenching in his jacket pocket. His hair was short, grey; his clothes were simple, utilitarian, like those of the three beside him. A uniform, but not one Katerin recognized. An ugly uniform, as ugly as the weapons hung at their sides and belts. “That’s feudal. That’s insane.”
“My family was here when these were feudal lands. I am here still,” Vasil said. “The historical records are kept in town. Nobody’s there now. You can examine them at your leisure.”
“I know what you claim to be, ‘boyär,’” a white-haired, fit-looking woman said. She didn’t flinch as she met his eyes. “I’ve heard stories from nomads.”
“Then you know that if you are off my land by sundown, I will leave you alone. Otherwise, there’s a price to be paid for the use of my estate.”
“We’re here to help you, not harm you,” the grey-haired man protested.
“You’ve come to pick grapes?”
“We’re testing toxin levels in the groundwater …”
“That doesn’t interest me. Unless you intend to help me bring in the harvest, I will claim my tithe.”
“We can’t afford to slip back into feudalism and anarchy! We must rebuild, not revert.”
Vasil’s eyebrows rose.
“It wasn’t feudalism and anarchy that brought us to this.”
“Come tonight and see if you can claim your tithe,” the grey-haired man retorted.
Vasil watched as they strode off, and then shut the door. Katerin set down her bone-handled brush.
“They look organized,” she said. “They might be ready for you.”
Vasil turned and looked down at her, then up at Reynard.
“That’s their right.”
“You can’t go!” Reynard gasped. He started to take a step down, remembered Katerin at the last moment.
“That’s my right,” Vasil replied, with a flash of amusement.
“It’s a foolish risk.” Katerin stood and slid her comb into Reynard’s coat pocket. She had to look up slightly to meet Vasil’s eyes. “Perhaps you are insane. Poisoned, like your land.”
Vasil turned sharply and strode into the dark of the parlor.
“They’ll kill him,” Reynard said fearfully. There was terror in the historian’s eyes as he clutched Katerin’s sleeve. “We have to stop him. They look like trained militia. They look like part of the reconstruction.”
“We can’t stop Vasil. He’s the lord of the land,” she said, shaking his hand off. She turned, frowned. “Why are you always so frightened?”
“Why aren’t you?” he whispered. “Don’t you know what it’s like out there?”
“Katerin?”
She whirled around, teeth bared, but it was only Reynard. The setting sun darkened his hair and hid the rips and tears in his archaic clothes until he almost looked like a boyär himself.
“What?”
“I … do you think they’ll kill him?”
“Vasil is smarter than any soldier,” she scoffed, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. Her hands were covered in damp soil, and she kept the metal pressed into the disturbed earth of the gravesite so that Reynard couldn’t see it. Mud covered her bare feet and soiled her skirt. “Now go inside. It’s dangerous for you to be out tonight.”
“But if he dies….”
“If he dies, I’ll make you my brother and care for you.” She frowned. “Go!”
He turned and walked back to the mansion. She waited for him to vanish from sight, then looked back down at the barbarian’s grave. She lifted her hand and turned the gun with mud-covered fingers. As the last rays of sunlight vanished, she began to pull it apart and clean it on her skirt.
Vasil was hunting, and she wished to do the same.
He was crucified to a rowan tree. Roses and dogflower filled his mouth. His white shirt was crimson with rose petals and blood.
Bullets had shredded the trees around the campsite. But apparently, this time, at least some of them had been silver.
He hadn’t died alone. The soldiers’ bodies were sprawled in the grass around him, limbs mangled, throats and guts torn out. Military weapons were strewn across bloodstained grass.
“God save us,” Reynard whispered, dropping to his knees and covering his eyes with his thin hands. Katerin stepped forward and touched Vasil’s pale face. Cold, hard, like plastic. She was reassured.
“He is dead. Winter is here. Now we leave,” she said, stepping back. Reynard looked up, face nearly as pale as Vasil’s.
“Aren’t you going to take him down, first?”
“No. It’s dangerous to disturb the dead, Reynard.”
He sucked in a sharp breath, looking again at the body. When he looked back, Katerin was already walking away. His hands crept up to touch the collar around his neck. He gazed up at Vasil, remembering old masses and older myths.
“But you’d rather lie in the land, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
Rose petals drifted like drops of blood from Vasil’s lips as Reynard worked the first stake from the tree.
She was cleaning the gun when Reynard returned. He watched her uncertainly for a moment, bloody fingers playing with the small silver lumps in his coat pocket. Then he walked upstairs to the room Vasil had given him. An hour later she entered it, just as he buttoned the cuffs of a new shirt over freshly washed wrists.
“We’ll leave tonight,” she announced.
“Tonight?” He sat on the bed and folded his hands in his lap. The old, bloodstained shirt was crumpled under the bed. He wondered if she could smell his trespass. “Will it be safe?”
“The soldiers may have radioed for help, but if we leave now, we’ll be gone by the time reinforcements turn up to investigate.” She laughed. Reynard wondered why she was so happy. He hadn’t heard her laugh before.
“Where will we go?” he asked, almost whispering the words.
“West, I think. You can teach me what I’ll need to know to survive, and we will make a new home.”
“It’s dangerous on the road. You don’t know. You can’t imagine.” He shivered, imagining Katerin standing alone in a ring of circling, predatory motorcycles. “How will we get there?”
“On all fours,” she replied. The frightened understanding that suddenly lit his eyes made her laugh a second time.
Vasil found Reynard huddled on the floor of the bedroom, groaning as he shuddered through the family changes. Shaking his head, he tracked Katerin to the garden. She sat with a half-full bottle of wine in front of her.
“A toast to fratricide?”
She started, then recovered herself and lifted her glass in salute. He admired her élan.
“It is a time-honored tradition,” she admitted. “But I see there’s some life left in the land, after all.”
He circled her, more puzzled than angry.
“Why did you do it?”
“You’re killing us, Vasil. Tithes! Estates! If you stay tied to the land, you will die with it.”
“The land is our birthright. You prefer to be feral?”
“I prefer to be free.”
“You don’t appreciate the sanctuary I have preserved here for us. It isn’t safe in the lands beyond my borders.”
She shrugged.
“I’m leaving anyway, with Reynard.”
“That whelp is to replace me?”
“Replace you? No.” She sipped the wine and licked her lips. “Reynard is weak. That’s why I like him. He cowers. He follows. He’ll follow me.”
“And what do you intend to do about me?”
“I had planned to leave you staked to this dying land that you prize so highly,” she said. “I can still do that. All I have to do is turn and walk away. You’ll never leave your estate, will you? Not even to chase me down.”
“No.” Vasil looked down, admitted defeat. He would not kill a member of his family. Old laws still bound him, as they did not bind her. “What do you think you’ll find, somewhere else? What will be better there than it is here?”
“Warm bodies instead of corpses. Blood instead of wine. Change instead of tradition.”
“You won’t be happy out there,” Vasil said. He looked up, light gleaming from the silver streak in his hair. “You’ll return. The true reconstruction begins here, with the land. Not there, not with the cities.”
“Farmer. Ecowarrior.”
“Child.”
Katerin stood in a swirl of stained skirts.
“A hundred years from now, Vasil, I will return. I’ll taste this year’s vintage and toast your memory. The last of the idealists. Poisoned by the land he loved.”
Vasil looked down, eyes sad.
“I hope you will not find the wine bitter, so many years from now.”
That night, he stood on the front porch and looked out at the prints in the dirt road. Two sets of tracks, heading south on the road toward the ocean.
He sighed, tasting the metallic ash that was still carried in the wind whenever it blew east and north. He wondered what the scientists had discovered, before they’d fought. Maybe their records would be intact, if he returned to search the camp.
Yesterday he’d found dying crows fluttering between the rows of vines, pale grape-fungus on their beaks and breasts.
He turned and walked back inside.
This year’s vintage would be the estate’s most memorable. He hoped he would survive long enough to see it put up against his family’s return.